Litui.Net

Primarily, this was a work trip, having been funded by Cansel. I worked Monday through Friday of last week. The trip was largely successful though not quite as much was completed as I would have hoped for. The two offices I needed to bring on to the company VPN were connected with only minor hitches, our Montreal branch server was migrated to Active Directory (though none of the workstations were), assets were verified and entered into our system (Asset Tracker running on Request Tracker, for those interested), a new wireless router was set up, the server room was cleaned up, and many odd jobs around the office were taken care of for the staff.

The duration of the work trip, I stayed in the Courtyard Marriott – Montreal Airport. I had a lovely room and my evenings were primarily spent swimming in the hotel pool, soaking in the tub while watching episodes of Family Guy on my laptop, or watching TV. The odd night was spent troubleshooting a Can-Net or networking issue. The hotel had a nice restaurant with very tasty main courses, though I admit to having eaten down the road at McDonalds a couple of nights in a row after remaining awake past the restaurant’s closing hours.

The area surrounding the Courtyard was, for a mostly industrial area, not too bad for activities. I didn’t have the desire to partake for the most part, but there were a number of restaurants, a shopping mall, and an English language movie theatre within walking distance. The distance to downtown was prohibitive for an evening excursion on a work night by public transit, and the cab fare would have been ridiculous for a single night. For this reason, I didn’t stray too far.

I found it a bit difficult to work in the Eastern time zone. Not only did I have to be in the office at a decent hour, but even after returning to the hotel after a long day I was fielding support calls from up to 3 time zones away. Since our head office is in Burnaby, this was more frequent than I would have liked While I’m not a morning person by any stretch, I do like my evenings to be my own. In Calgary, my work day (for support anyway) seldom extends past 6PM, but in Montreal it could go as late as 8PM. I do occasionally get 5AM wakeup calls from Halifax while in Calgary but compared to our Head Office, the Halifax branch is rather small and these calls are rare.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Travel, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.